One purpose of this series on Race in America and the American Church is to challenge the commonly held belief that racism, primarily white racism, is at the heart of racial tension in America today and the primary cause of many of the problems that minorities face. And to suggest that a more significant reason for racial tension and minority problems is theological and political liberalism, including the welfare state.

One purpose of this series on Race in America and the American Church is to challenge the commonly held belief that racism, primarily white racism, is at the heart of racial tension in America today and the primary cause of many of the problems that minorities face. And to suggest that a more significant reason for racial tension and minority problems is theological and political liberalism, including the welfare state.

Part 2 of this series noted, “America’s history of slavery and racism is well known.” While this is true in a general sense, most Americans lack specific knowledge of this history. So, before moving forward developing this thesis—a thesis that many would say ignores the harm being suffered by minorities today because of racism, it is worth taking time to briefly survey what race relations and racism have looked like in our country.

In his book Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure, Gene Dattel notes “the prerequisite for a successful ethnically diverse population living under one roof is assimilation, which leads to a national identity, unity, and the practical means to facilitate social, legal, and commercial interchange.” Unfortunately, as Dattel points out, “In the American story, the major exception to assimilation, of course, was the exclusion of black America.”

It was like this almost from the beginning as Europeans settling the American colonies followed the example of Spain by using black slave labor to help make their overseas colonies profitable.

While American slavery was largely—though not exclusively—an institution of the South, the attitude toward blacks as inferior to whites also manifested itself in the North.

Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, recounts a story explaining part of the motivation for the founding of the AME’s first church, St. Thomas African Church, Philadelphia, in 1794. He and a few others, including Absalom Jones, were worshiping at St. George’s Methodist Church a few years earlier. Allen wrote:

We had not been long on our knees before I heard considerable scuffling and loud talking. I raised my head up and saw one of the trustees, H–M–having hold of the Rev. Absalom Jones pulling him off his knees and saying, “You must get up; you must not kneel here.”

The upstairs gallery was where blacks were supposed to worship, even though, as Allen noted, he and other blacks “had subscribed largely towards furnishing St. George’s Church, in building the gallery, and laying new floors).

Slavery was fatal for many blacks, even for those who never arrived in America. In its May 20, 1860, edition, Harper’s Weekly reported on the capture of the slave bark, Wildfire, operating illegally in defiance of the United States ban on the importation of slaves in 1808. John Dwyer summarized the article in The War Between the States:

According to Harper’s, the Wildfire … had left the Congo River in Arica five weeks before with six hundred slaves. One hundred had since died and forty more were ill, mostly from dysentery. The remainder “were generally in a very good condition of health and flesh, as compared with other similar cargoes, owing to the fact that they had not been so much crowded together on board as is common in slave voyages.” Some had been slaves in Africa. All—men, women, children—were naked.

About this same time, as America was considering what to do with blacks who would be free once the inevitable end of slavery came to pass, Abraham Lincoln expressed the view of many whites from the North and South that newly freed blacks might be sent to Africa to start a new colony. In 1857, Abraham Lincoln said

Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime.

A few years later, Lincoln, in his 1862 State of the Union Address, included free blacks in the colonization scheme:

[It] might well be well to consider, too, whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals desire, be included in such colonization.

Slavery ended with the Civil War, but blacks as a whole made slow progress toward assimilation, including economic improvement. Douglas Blackmon questioned why this was the case in his Slavery by Another Name: “If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s?”

For his answer, Blackmon described a system of forced labor by prisoners—largely black—often arrested for minor crimes—or sometimes for no crime at all:

Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. …

By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of the primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was no coincidental that 1901 also marked the full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South.

Not just government and big business were complicit in racism, so was some of the American church. The Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) serves as one example. In For a Continuing Church: The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), Sean Michael Lewis explains the views of some in the PCUS:

J.E. Flow observed that segregation was “the best way to preserve the peace and protect the lives” of both blacks and whites. He later suggested that Christians believed that “God Almighty made both of these [races] and He, and He alone, could have made them to differ from one another, and the difference is far more deep seated than the color of their faces.” The natural conclusion was that because God had providentially ordered things this way, well-meaning Christians should encourage racial integrity. …

There were several who attempted to justify segregation on biblical grounds. In an early essay on race relations, Nelson Bell observed that there was “a line which must be drawn and which must not be crossed” and then referenced Acts 17:26, which suggested that “God also determined ‘the bounds of their habitations.’” … W. A. Plecker … identified the children of Ham with those were to be “servants of their brethren” and who “were headed for Africa.” William H. Frazer claimed that “we believe in the ‘social separation’ of the races because we think that God believes in it.”

We’ll stop our survey in the 1950s, not because racism came to a halt, but because the issue begins to get much more complicated. For at the same time we saw the increasing public exposure of racism and racial violence committed by whites, we also saw increasing economic prosperity and educational achievement for blacks.

In this sense, Douglas Blackmon was a bit off in framing his question about the “labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society.” It was actually in the years before the widespread civil rights movement that black assimilation and advancement started to increase rapidly.

In a 1951 Detroit survey, more residents reported they found white Southerners objectionable (21 percent) than they did blacks (13 percent). The number of blacks receiving college degrees increased fivefold from before the First World War to 1935. In 1947 black colleges in one year granted more college degrees to blacks than had been issued to all blacks before the First World War. In fact, black achievement was more rapid in the years preceding civil rights legislation and the welfare state than in the years after.

What America has done to blacks through slavery and racism in the past is terrible. But to assume that white racism is still widespread and the primary cause of racial tension and minority (especially black) poverty is also harmful to blacks, for it provides no path forward for addressing the harm caused by liberalism to blacks, other minorities, or all Americans.

Bill Peacock is a member of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Austin, Texas. His writings on religion, culture, and politics can be found at www.excellentthought.net.